It dawned on me over time that music was one of the first forms of documentation that was
actually collected by historians from this period. The topical songs are a little bit
like snapshots. You can listen to them or look at them and get what they give on the
surface, and then the more you seek to contextualize them, the more you're going to understand
about the history and where they came from. I'm Bret Werb, and I have been for many years
the music and sound collection curator at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Henry Baigelman
was a musician born in Lodz, Poland, in 1911. He comes from a very interesting lineage.
The Baigelman family had been a klezmer musician dynasty that could, can be traced back to probably
the middle of the nineteenth century or earlier in Poland. As a member of a dynastic musical
family, Henry Baigelman just naturally became a music professional as did his seven brothers
and three sisters. Henry and his brothers played in cabaret ensembles, for weddings,
and also in popular culture as members of swing and jazz and pop bands. Henry himself
was a violinist and a saxophonist. His older brother, David, was perhaps the most famous
composer of Jewish music in interwar Poland. In the ghetto, all the Baigelmans were involved
in music activities. David Baigelman, the older brother, composed a number of songs
that survive that became folklorized. These songs were collected and preserved afterwards.
We don't have the David Baigelman scores. David Baigelman did not survive. None of the
Baigelman siblings survived except for Henry Baigelman. After the war, Henry Baigelman
found himself a group of fellow musicians who, most of them were relatives one way or
another, and in a DP situation reorganized a group that called itself The Happy Boys.
It was a ensemble that played light music, Jewish theme music, and topical music about
being displaced. We also have from them the lyric sheets from the original songs that
Henry composed about the DP experience. Many of the songs that were, that originated in
displaced persons camps or that became popular there seem to highlight this theme of, of
being unwanted. The one song sheet that we can focus on here, which is "Es bengt zich
nuch a hajm," which is an original lyric by Henry Baigelman and does very specifically
focus on this one aspect of the DP existence.
As a Holocaust memorial, we're very focused on what took place at that
time during the period of the Holocaust, the camps and ghetto experiences, and I think
what had been overlooked initially would have been what the displaced persons were up to.
The survivors, the initial survivors, those who were on the one hand trying very hard
to forget what had just happened to them and move on with life, and the other hand, hoping
never to forget, wanting to perpetuate the memory of those recent experiences, and although
maybe the person who created this song is not going to survive, someone is going to
survive who will have locked into their minds. The DPs were the first to see the importance
of this and make sure that they were somehow or another archived, and we're now finding
dozens and dozens of songs that speak directly to this: The inability to find a new home.